A RESURRECTION (2013)

Studio:       Jamie Kennedy Entertainment
Director:    Matt Orlando
Writer:       Matt Orlando
Producer:  Aaron Levine, Phillip Glasser, Brian Hartman
Stars:     Mischa Barton, Devon Sawa, Michael Clarke Duncan, J. Michael Trautmann

Review Score:

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Summary:

After a hit-and-run driver takes his brother’s life, a high school boy enacts a plan for revenge that will bring his sibling back from the grave. 

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Eli Driggers wakes from a dream in which his dead brother Devon comes back to life. School counselor Jessie Parker spends the morning with her boyfriend, Deputy Travis.

At school, Eli draws pictures of several classmates. He gives one to a girl in the cafeteria and tells the table, “he is coming for you.” After school, a group of classmates confronts Eli about his drawings and starts a fight that lands everyone in the principal’s office. Jessie interviews Eli about troubles over his brother’s death. He remains quiet until claiming that all of the other students are responsible for his brother’s death. While drinking and driving, jealous classmate Brandon accidentally ran Devon over as a prank. Nick and Alex were in the car with Brendon. Brendon’s father Vince confronts Principal Addison about his son’s altercation with Eli. Vince has body shop paperwork showing the car was repaired after hitting a deer, but it was supposedly before the accident.

Travis discovers that Devon’s grave is empty. He goes by the Driggers home and discovers the mother’s dead body inside. Eli tells Jessie that Devon was never dead and that he took the body to a witch whose spell will resurrect his brother. She learns more from a book of occult magic found in Eli’s locker. Nick confesses to Jessie that Brandon ran over Devon. She goes to tell the principal, but discovers that he is dead. Travis interviews the witch about what she did with Devon’s body.

Jessie discovers that the other students have been locked in the classroom where they are serving detention. With Nick at her side, she searches for the custodian Ignacio to unlock the chains. Nick disappears while waiting for her and she then finds a blood trail in the bathroom. Jessie discovers Nick dead and Eli then finds her. Travis finds a group of Hispanic men crouching over a dead pig in the middle of the road. They mention something about the witch.

Back in the school, Jessie is inexplicably attacked by Ignacio, but she stabs him with a screwdriver she stashed earlier and escapes. Ignacio recovers and cuts Jessie’s leg badly. She passes out, but regains consciousness and drags herself down the hallway. Meanwhile, Vince receives a text claiming to be from his son that asks him to come to the school, where he is subsequently killed. Eli finds Jessie crawling. She tells him to stay away. He tells her that six people have to die to bring his brother back, but she was not supposed to be one of them. Eli helps carry Jessie to the nurse’s office. At the site of the pig in the road, Ignacio appears in Travis’ backseat and attacks him.

The resurrected Devon appears to the trapped classmates and he kills his former girlfriend and the others. Jessie reads more of Eli’s occult book and learns that Christian prayers can stop the magic. She begins to say the Our Father. Devon is stunted by the prayer. Travis appears in the hallway as Devon and Eli approach Jessie. Devon kills Travis but Travis is able to shoot Eli first. Devon carries Eli away.

Jessie attends Travis’ funeral. She later enters the witch’s home and the sheriff finds her there. He is suspicious about what really happened, and indicates that Ignacio was the witch’s grandson, but he lets Jessie go. At the graveyard, Devon mourns Eli before driving away with the witch.

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Review:

“A Resurrection” has difficulty finding its footing in the Suspense, Thriller, or Horror genres.  Rather than concentrate on fitting well into one of those categories, the movie settles for being lackluster in all three concurrently.

Specifically, there is an identity crisis about whether to play the story as a mystery or to aim strictly for supernatural tinged terror.  Unable to choose, the film meanders a middling line between the two and ends up as neither.

Eli is a troubled high schooler who recently lost his beloved brother in a tragic hit-and-run accident.  But he may have a way to bring his sibling back from the grave and punish the classmates he holds responsible in the process.  Standing in his way are the counselor and the town deputy who are unraveling the truth behind the death and the resurrection.

No stranger to high school-related roles, Mischa Barton takes a turn on the other side of the desk for this go as the school’s resident mental health professional.  She fits the role fine, although her casting is quizzically out of place.  Accepting Mischa Barton as one of the faculty instead of as one of the pupils pushes the limits of disbelief when she is actually younger than several of the actors playing her students.

The audience is then made to experience an identity crisis of its own.  Chiefly, there is no other character to identify with.  Devon, the dead brother, is seen only in a singular flashback and never has a line of dialogue.  With next to nothing known about him, there is no reason to mourn his mortality or wish to see the guilty punished.  (Other than a natural sense of right and wrong, of course.)  His younger brother Eli is portrayed by J. Michael Trautman.  According to the credits, anyway.  Eli may in fact have been a resurrected zombie himself, or he could have been someone wearing a mask of the actor, as his face rarely changes.  The emotion expressed ranges between brooding scowl and sullen pout.  The difference is notable only by the depth of his brow furrow.

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In his final screen appearance, the late Michael Clarke Duncan plays the school’s principal.  Sadly, the amount of screentime given to his scenes clocks in at a scant total of around five minutes.  Devon Sawa as Deputy Travis spends his time continuing to stand over an open grave long after discovering it is empty.  From there, he is ably distracted by a crazy old coot stroking a skinned fox and a gaggle of men stooping over a dead pig in the road.  It is as if the script occasionally snaps from a daze to recall that Mischa Barton has a love interest and then fumbles to find the deputy something to do.  When not offering exposition, he generally spends time chasing dead leads.

Chasing dead leads is a theme with “A Resurrection.”  The film begins on a path of revenge fantasy coupled with a dose of zombie voodoo, and then tries a twist by suggesting the troubled boy is perhaps more disturbed than anyone suspected.  (Mild SPOILER) Rather than provide a true mystery by scattering meaningful diversions around a rope of suspense, the movie makes one yarn ball out of all the threads and combines every possibility to explain the events.  The resulting story causes itchy scalps not out of mystery, but out of confusion for why the filmmakers wanted to play the story that way.  Compounding the issue is the snail’s pace it takes to come to a resolution on any of those fronts.

It becomes clear that characters like Deputy Travis are stuck spinning wheels just to pointlessly keep a plate of red herring whirling on a rod.  Other characters have no relation at all to the central plot (the female students detained in a classroom) or exist merely for a body count or other nonsensical purpose.  Sensing that some elements are still unclear, one character even appears for the first time in the second to last scene just to explain a leftover dangler.

Underdeveloped characters are overtasked with busy work to distract from a plot still choosing where to go.  Had “A Resurrection” focused on a primary goal, e.g. suspense, horror, mystery, it might have been more successful.  Trying to incorporate all of these elements at once was more than it could chew, and the movie ends up falling flat on all sides.

NOTE:  “A Resurrection” was previously known as “The Sibling.”

Review Score:  30

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